On October 26, 2011, lawyers for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed suit in U.S. District Court in San Diego, alleging that five wild-captured orcas (killer whales) owned by the marine amusement parks SeaWorld San Diego and SeaWorld Orlando were being held in captivity in violation of their rights under the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States.

The suit asked the court to recognize the animals’ captivity as “slavery and/or involuntary servitude” and to order their release from “bondage” and their transfer to “a suitable habitat in accordance with each Plaintiff’s individual needs and best interests.”

The key to PETA’s legal argument was that the Thirteenth Amendment explicitly prohibits only the conditions of slavery and involuntary servitude, not specifically the enslavement or bondage of human beings. The operative clause states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Strict adherence to the text of the amendment would permit extending the rights against slavery and involuntary servitude to beings other than those for whom the amendment was written (African American slaves). Needless to say, such a reading would not comport with the scope of the amendment as the authors envisioned it. Yet broadening the application of the right against slavery would not be unprecedented, PETA argued, because it has already been “defined and expanded by common law to address morally unjust conditions of bondage and forced service existing anywhere in the United States.” Although the right against involuntary servitude is less clearly defined, each of its minimal elements—identified in the suit as “the rights to one’s own life and liberty, to labor for one’s own benefit, and to be free from physical subjugation or coercion by another”—is violated by the conditions in which the orcas have been held, according to PETA.

The suit is, if anything, unique, apparently being the first attempt to secure recognition of constitutional rights for nonhuman animals in a federal court, according to Jeff Kerr, PETA’s general counsel, as reported by the Associated Press (AP). “By any definition,” he told AP, “these orcas are slaves—kidnapped from their homes, kept confined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.” In a separate statement, Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s president, said: “All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies. They are denied freedom and everything else that is natural and important to them while kept in small concrete tanks and reduced to performing stupid tricks. The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery, and these orcas are, by definition, slaves.”

Naturally, the suit has provided fodder for PETA’s ideological opponents, who have seized on it as fresh proof that the organization is “crazy,” “silly,” “stupid,” and “clueless.” “It’s not hard to draw out the crazy implications here,” commented CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a televised discussion of the suit. “I mean, can a cow sue McDonald’s to get an injunction not to turn the cow into a hamburger?” (“Why not?”, one would like to have heard, but no one on PETA’s side was invited to take part). PETA is of course well known for its provocative advertising and protest campaigns, which it undertakes in the apparent conviction that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Detractors have accordingly dismissed the suit as just another “publicity stunt” and have confidently predicted that the court, once the case is heard, will do likewise.

As in some earlier campaigns, however, the suit has managed to dismay some members and sympathizers of the animal-rights movement, who see it as a public-relations liability, and to offend others who object to comparisons between animal cruelty and abuses or persecutions of human beings. In the words of more than one critic, PETA’s suit has “denigrated” African American slaves by equating their condition with that of captive animals. Even some advocates of greater legal rights for animals have expressed doubt about the ultimate value of the suit, seeing it as wrongheaded in its approach and as a drain on resources that could be devoted to a sounder strategies, such as those aimed at recognizing some animals as “living property” or as “legal persons.”

For its part, SeaWorld (which is itself a legal person, with a right to free speech) issued a statement claiming that the suit is “baseless and in many ways offensive” and that “there is no higher priority than the welfare of the animals entrusted to our care.” The “performances” of the orcas and other marine mammals are educational, the statement insisted.

Whatever the legal merits of the suit, the circumstances it describes certainly make a strong prima facie case that the orcas held by SeaWorld are slaves—in fact if not in law. The suit reviews in some detail the complex cognitive, emotional, and family lives of orcas, including their ability to communicate through intricate and systematically distinct dialects of clicks, whistles, and calls; and discusses the damaging effects on the animals of isolation and confinement in artifical and extremely cramped conditions, amounting to 1/100,000 to 1/10,000 the volume of water they would traverse in a 24-hour period in the wild. Orcas in captivity typically show clear signs of psychological distress, frustration, loneliness, and boredom and display pathological behaviors such as abnormal repetitive movements, self-mutilation, stress-induced vomiting, and excessive aggression, including toward humans. Although captive orcas have killed or seriously injured trainers and attendants on several occasions, there is no documented case of an orca attacking a human in the wild, according to the suit. A major contributor to the animals’ stress is the concrete surfaces of the performance and holding tanks, which act as intense echo reflectors for animals who naturally orient themselves with sonar. “Confining [orcas] in barren concrete tanks with acoustically reflective walls,” according to the suit, “is equivalent to a human living captive in a room covered with mirrors on all walls and the floor.”

Orcas are trained to perform tricks, such as perching on their bellies completely out of water, in shows that may be repeated eight times a day, seven days a week. For successful performances they are rewarded with dead fish. Orcas who fail to perform are given reduced rations.

In captivity female orcas are artificially inseminated to replenish the captive population. Semen is taken from captive male orcas for the same purpose. SeaWorld’s five wild-captured orcas (the plaintiffs in the suit) were obtained in hunts conducted for the animal-display industry off British Columbia and Iceland from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The 14 other orcas held in SeaWorld parks were born in captivity. (Thus, approximately three quarters of the orcas owned by SeaWorld were “entrusted” to it by itself.) Since the 1980s, U.S. state and federal laws have effectively prohibited SeaWorld from obtaining orcas from the wild.

The suit was brought on the whales’ behalf by PETA and five researchers, educators, and activists (Ric O’Barry, Dr. Ingrid N. Visser, Howard Garrett, Samantha Berg, and Carol Ray) under Rule 17(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which allows minors or incompetent persons to be represented by a “next friend” (an officer of the court who is responsible for protecting the interests of the minor or incompetent person during the proceeding).

The five plaintiffs—Tilikum, Katina, Kasatka, Corky, and Ulises—were babies aged one to three years when they were taken from their mothers and podmates in the wild from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Tilikum, who is confined in SeaWorld Orlando, was captured in waters off Iceland in 1983. In 1990 he killed a trainer by dragging her around his tank until she drowned. For a year afterward he was confined to a holding pen that was barely bigger than himself. According to the suit, Tilikum is SeaWorld’s “most valuable animal,” because the sperm taken from him has been used to produce two-thirds of the orcas born in SeaWorld parks.

Katina and Kasatka were aged two and one year, respectively, when they were captured in waters off Iceland in 1983. Both have been used as female “breeding machines” through multiple artificial inseminations. Katina was inseminated at the young age of nine and has since produced seven calves.

Corky, the oldest orca owned by SeaWorld, was captured in 1969 when she was three years old. She has been bred seven times, six times incestuously with a cousin. None of her calves survived more than 46 days. Ulises also was three years old when he was captured off Iceland in 1980. Held at SeaWorld San Diego since 1994, he is “subjected to bullying and injuries by incompatible orcas,” according to the suit.

PETA argues that all of these animals have been “deprived of of liberty, forced to live in grotesquely unnatural conditions and perform tricks, … prevented from satisfying [their] basic drives and from engaging in virtually all natural behaviors, … subjected to extreme physiological and mental stress and suffering while, at the same time, Defendants and their predecessors have reaped millions of dollars in profits from [their] slavery and involuntary servitude.”

By all accounts except PETA’s, the suit is highly unlikely to succeed. Yet, some real benefit may come of it, in the view of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, also quoted in the AP report. “People may well look back at this lawsuit and see in it a perceptive glimpse into a future of greater compassion for species other than our own.” We can only hope he is right.

Update: On February 8, 2012, U.S. District Court judge Jeffrey Miller dismissed PETA’s suit on the grounds that the Thirteenth Amendment applies only to persons. “The only reasonable interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s plain language is that it applies to persons, and not to non-persons such as orcas,” he wrote.